Resolution Reassurance for Video Quality of Experience: Attribute Substitution in a New Context

With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread pressure to work and learn from home, online videos have become integral for both pre-recorded material as well as real-time conferences. Due to the dramatic increase in video use in recent years, improvement of the online Quality of Experience (QoE) is becoming increasingly meaningful. One prominent QoE factor is video resolution, which may influence users’ interpretation of the quality of the video content. If so, a relatively low resolution may result in an attribution error in which video resolution is misconstrued with content quality. The current project investigates attribute substitution in which the participants viewed a brief video with one of two resolutions. The saliency of the video resolution that was viewed was hypothesized to impact participant valuation of content QoE in several domains. While two of the hypotheses were refuted regarding video persuasiveness and enjoyability, the results suggest that the salience of the video resolution impacted the amount of effort required to understand the video. The participants reported that high-resolution videos were easier to understand when the resolution was made salient, which is referred to in the current study as resolution reassurance. Conversely, low-resolution videos were considered less understandable when their resolution was made salient.